Archive for category Tours

Although Halloween is over, you still have a lot of Gothic literature blog posts you can read about. If you missed any of the stops on the tour, here is the list of permalinks to participants posts! I personally had a hard time keeping up this tour, but I look forward to visiting each blog this week and seeing just what you had to say about the Gothic classics!

It’s officially October, which means our Gothic Literature Classics Circuit tour will be coming very soon, beginning in just two weeks. Below (after the jump), you will find the schedule for this very full tour!

I hope you enjoy following the tour as it comes. It’s bound to bring us into the proper mood for this Halloween season.

As always, if you note a mistake on this schedule or if you change your mind about the book you’d like to post on, please send me an email at rebecca[at]rebeccareid[dot]com.

When you do post feel free to send a link to @classicscirc on twitter and I’ll retweet it for others to find!

The end-of-October tour will be celebrating the “original” gothic novels, those written during the Romantic era.

I’m defining the era as pre-1840. The following information may give you an idea where to begin as you search for what work you’d like to read for the tour. You may also want to read the LitGothic page for some additional ideas. Some people may also be interested in the gothic novels that Catherine Moreland references in Austen’s Northanger Abbey. You can find some information about those novels here.

Keep in mind that although the literary gothic extends to present day, we’re only counting books or stories written before 1840 for this current tour.

Other than the year written guideline, I don’t want to be too picky: if the work you want to read is not on this list but if you think it fits the gothic tradition, then go ahead and select it!

The button for this tour is an image I took in September 2005. It is a gargoyle on the side of Notre Dame. Feel free to use it to promote the tour on your blog.

How the tour works: If you are new to the Classics Circuit, please read this paragraph so you may have a better understanding of how the tour operates. First, make sure you sign up via the form, not in the comments. You must have a blog to be a tour participant. On the sign up form, please indicate either which days you want to post, or which days you are unable to post on your blog. Someone from the Classics Circuit will email you your assigned date. We will post a schedule on this blog linking to all the participating blogs. On your assigned day in your time zone, please post about your selected work. If this is not clear, feel free to email rebecca[at]rebeccareid[dot]com. Thanks for your interest in joining the Circuit! If you do not have a blog, I still encourage you to follow the tour once it begins in October.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert or student of gothic literature at all. I am simply a reader of classics (like the rest of you) that decided to compile a list of what I’ve found classified as gothic literature, pre-1840s. If you are a gothic literature expert, please share what I’ve missed in the comments for those that come along in the future.

Sign up is closed.

As you plan your reading for the coming months, please take note that the last two weeks of October (tentatively planned for October 17-28) will feature a tour of Pre-Victorian Gothic Literature (published before about 1840)

Pre-Victorian Gothic literature includes

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole’s

The Mysteries of Udolpho or The Romance of the Forest by Anne Radcliffe

The Monk by Matthew Lewis

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

And much more.

We’ll be preparing an introductory form with more reading ideas, book summaries, and links to online reviews. Sign up will begin (probably) at the end of next week. Stay tuned!

If you want to help pull together book lists, write book summaries, and/or find quotes from bloggers or reviewers online, please send me an email at rebecca[at]rebeccareid[dot]com.

On Monday, we begin our Steinbeck Classics Circuit Tour. The following sites are where John Steinbeck will be visiting on each day. Check back each morning to click over to the reviews. Thanks for following the tour, and enjoy!

It’s time for another tour! This time, we’re celebrating the writings of John Steinbeck.

John Steinbeck lived from 1902 to 1968, writing more than two dozen books, including fiction, nonfiction, and stories. Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 for The Grapes of Wrath, and in 1962, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, an award given to an author with the best body of work.

The button is a government image of an Okie family packing up their car to travel out of the dust bowl during the Great Depression. Since this is the subject Steinbeck’s Pultizer Prize-winning novel (The Grapes of Wrath), it seemed a significant image to use to promote our own tour around the blogosphere. Feel free to download the button for your own use.

Although the tour dates are not determined yet, the tour will probably run beginning August 15 and going until about August 26, depending on how many people have signed up. We will email an assigned day. You are to post on your blog on your assigned day.

Sign up is now closed.

If you are coming to this late and would really like to participate, send an email to rebecca[at]rebeccareid[dot]com with your blog url, the book you’d like to write about, and your available days. Please contact me before the tour begins.

Blog titles below link to bloggers’ post for the Jane Austen vs Charles Dickens Circuit. I hope you enjoy looking over all the posts, and a big thanks to all who participated! This was a very close call and I ‘m not sure how close we are to declaring a winner. We have to put it up for a vote! So please take the time to think about your experiences with these authors and watch out for our tie breaking poll at the end of the week. And of course stay tuned for the next Classics Circuit tour.

Lifetime Reading Plan – Lady Susan by Jane AustenStiletto Storytime – A Tale of Two Orphans a comparison of the main characters of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens and Mansfield Park by Jane AustenShe Reads Novels – Persuasion by Jane Austen & The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles and Dickens

Lifetime Reading Plan – Lady Susan by Jane AustenStiletto Storytime – A Tale of Two Orphans a comparison of the main characters of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens and Mansfield Park by Jane AustenShe Reads Novels – Persuasion by Jane Austen & The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles and Dickens